Jimmy Kimmel asked Stormy Daniels about Trump affair rumors. She said ... not much

A new report from the WSJ alleges a lawyer representing President Trump arranged a $130,000 payment to a former adult film star one month before the 2016 presidential election to prevent her from discussing an alleged sexual encounter between her and Trump in 2006.
USA TODAY

Stormy Daniels drops by to chat with Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday.(Photo: RANDY HOLMES/ABC)

The trick to interviewing Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is that she signed a non-disclosure agreement in return for all that money.

Or she didn’t. She wasn’t going to admit to anything.

If she did have such an agreement, Kimmel pointed out, she couldn’t say so. But if she didn’t she could say so. Or something. Kimmel, in attempting to get her to talk about Trump, tried an end run around the agreement using that logic.

“You’re so smart, Jimmy,” was all Daniels would say.

The whole segment was maddening like that. Daniels tried to coyly deflect Kimmel’s questions while not really denying anything.

Well, she did deny one thing, sort of. Shortly before Kimmel’s show, a statement was released, purportedly by Daniels, denying the affair and the payment. Kimmel pointed out that the signature doesn’t look like hers.

Asked where it came from, Daniels said, “I do not know where it came from.”

You could extrapolate from that an answer that Daniels did not, in fact, issue the statement. But again, she didn’t deny it. Mostly, she just talked about rumors she’d seen on the Internet about herself (today’s online offerings: She is an FBI agent, and a man).

Stormy Daniels uses a puppet to play Never Have I Ever with Jimmy Kimmel.(Photo: Randy Holmes/ABC)

Nothing if not persistent, Kimmel tried using Daniels and Trump puppets (his was clothed in tightie-whities) to get an answer out of her, but that didn’t really work, either. A bit with three different sizes of carrots — use your imagination — also didn’t get very far.

One of the complaints Trump’s critics have made about him is that his antics — plenty of which have been confirmed — along with his scorched-earth tweets, arrive so fast and furious that the media and the public can’t keep up. An abnormal normalcy sets in.

We’ll see how it goes with Daniels. Other than rumors of an angry first lady, Trump hasn’t seemed to suffer much from the stories. Maybe Daniels will just become another bizarre footnote among the truckload of them piling up after Trump’s first year in office. Maybe we’ll never hear from her again.